Russ Feingold: Terrorism Is Our Fault

May 9, 2006

RUSH: Let’s go to the audio sound bites there, Alltmont. We’ll start here at the top with number one. (story) ‘Russ Feingold, a potential anti-war candidate in the 2008 presidential field, urged fellow Democrats on Monday to show more backbone in challenging President Bush on Iraq. ‘We must get out of our political foxholes and be willing to clearly and specifically point out what a strategic error the Iraq invasion has been.” Sounds just like Mahmoud! That was Mahmoud’s whole point. What do we have here? Three, four sound bites, and the first one, Feingold says the Democrats have to continue to stand up to Bush, which is laughable. As though they haven’t been doing that all along. In their minds what they’ve been doing, apparently, has not been standing up, and they need to do more of it.

FEINGOLD: The greatest passion is for us to stand up on the critical post-9/11 issues, from Iraq, to the USA Patriot Act, to the president violating the law by authorizing illegal domestic wiretapping. The president likes to say, in response to this sort of concern, that some of us have a pre-9/11 perspective. Many Democrats and others around this country want us to point out that the White House actually has a pre-1776 perspective and that we ought to have the guts to point that out. (Applause.)

RUSH: I don’t know who the audience is at this thing. At the National Press Club, you’ve got to figure it’s some Drive-By Media people in there. It’s their club. (sigh) Domestic wiretapping. Now, there’s a story in the LA Times today about this. This is another See, I Told You So. ‘By picking Air Force Gen. Michael V. Hayden as the next CIA director, President Bush faces another brawl over his controversial program to eavesdrop on suspected terrorists &mdash; including people on American soil &mdash; without court approval. But far from fearing such a fight, the White House walked right into it by nominating the program’s leading defender to head the spy agency.’

On page two of this story comes this interesting little tidbit. ‘Still, some Democrats quietly worried Monday that their party might help the GOP by making an issue of the spy program.’ Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I tell you, the White House wants this fight. They know it’s a slam-dunk. Nothing better than having an Air Force general in uniform up there being ripped to shreds for talking about how he wants to protect the country and accurately explain the NSA foreign surveillance program. The Democrats, by the way, have now posed an idea.

They say, ‘Well, you know, this is a spy program, very sensitive. We might have to go into executive session for these questions, which means closed session, which means nobody would get to see it. There would only be leaks afterwards. The leaks would probably take the form of the tough questions asked by people like Dianne Feinstein or Russ Feingold, and Leaky Pat Leahy and whoever else.’ But if they don’t do this in public, it means they haven’t got the guts for people to see what would actually transpire here, that they want to use leaks from a closed executive session. ‘I usually can’t leak on those things, Rush, intelligence committee, you can’t leak.’ Tell it to Pat Leahy. I don’t think he’s on that committee anymore because he did leak about an operation we had planned in Libya.

So that’s the game plan. If they’re getting cold feet they’ll go into executive session, if the Republicans let them get away with it, and you never know, given some of the Republican senators. Now, I’m not mentioned in this [next bite], folks, but I know how to read the stitches on a fast ball. I know how to read the tea leaves. I think Feingold is responding to me when I said yesterday that the Hayden hearings will be a winner for Bush.FEINGOLD: You already hear people saying that this Michael Hayden nomination will be a great opportunity for the White House to show the Democrats are soft on terrorism. You bet the pundits in this town will somehow suggest that, this too, just like my censure resolution, will cause the president’s numbers to shoot up. You remember that happening, right? It didn’t happen at all. But that’s what they’re going to say. It’s not right.RUSH: Stop the tape. Nobody joined your stupid censure resolution, and you left the floor, you skedaddled, you got out of there rather than debate it with Republicans. Nobody joined your stupid — you know, I was thinking about Feingold. What has he ever done besides get elected? Can somebody explain one achievement of Russ Feingold? Other than the censure deal, he makes good speeches to fire up the kook base. He’s a munchkin. Resume tape, Alltmont.FEINGOLD: I take a different view with one qualification. My view is that we should appeal to basic American values in the post-9/11 world.RUSH: Stop the tape. Do you know what those basic American values are, senator? People like me think you have forgotten them, or if you remember them you disagree with them and are trying to redefine them.FEINGOLD: By saying that we will stand up to this administration’s mistakes in strategy in the fight against terrorism, and that we will stand up to this administration’s unnecessary assault on the rule of law in the guise of the fight against terrorism.RUSH: Well, there you have it. This is a left-wing kook view. The spy program, Bush doesn’t care about finding what spies are doing in this country. He doesn’t care about what Al-Qaeda might be plotting. That’s just an excuse, because Bush is Bush, and he wants to spy on you. And, of course, the left-wing kooks, that’s all they need to hear. They don’t ask what does he want to spy on me for? What am I doing in my miserable little kook life that Bush would possibly care about? Bush is not a voyeur. Bush is in bed at 9:30 at night. The last thing George Bush cares about is what idiotic left-wing kook liberals are doing. Besides, they tell us anyway. They’re all over announcing everything they’re doing, they’re marching in the streets. What do they need to be spied on for?

The idea that a United States senator — and it’s clear what he’s doing, he’s pandering, demagoguing to that base. He’s trying to secure the support and the nomination from that group of people in Kooksville. But to set up this notion that Bush actually wants to spy on the American people. For what? What’s he trying to learn? What’s he trying to discover? Most people’s lives, particularly on the kook fringe, are so dull and boring, that’s why they’re kook-fringe leftists. They are trying to find anything in life to give themselves some sense of relevance, some sense of mattering, some sense of importance. So they go out and they march and they beat their chests, and they get mad and they throw around all these accusations. But who in the world, I mean, would you want to spy on a liberal? I mean, they do everything they do in public anyway. They don’t believe in hiding anything. I mean, it’s boring to watch, discuss. And I’m sure Bush has much better things to do than that. BREAK TRANSCRIPTRUSH: Back now to Russ Feingold, a big finale here, the big finish. He says that Democrats have to show that 9/11 is just as personal to them as it is to those who use the issue to intimidate them as Democrats. FEINGOLD: I say all of this in the belief that somehow we all have to be talking about not this country or that, but how we can best protect American lives at home and abroad.RUSH: Stop the tape. Get serious. You don’t care about it. If you did, you wouldn’t be saying and doing 30 to 50% of the things you do. You’re trying to undermine victory over this particular enemy, senator, with everything you’re doing. That’s why this doesn’t sell. You can go out there and say, “We need to get tough. We need to show people you don’t need to be intimidated. We care about America. We care about America’s security.” It doesn’t sell, Senator. You just don’t have the guys on your side to pull it off. I mean, you can say whatever you want but you don’t have anybody with any practical experience in any position in the last ten years that you can point to and say, “We want to follow the lead of Democrat X.” In fact, I have a story here in the stack, folks, about all the domestic spying that Feingold’s hero did during World War II, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. At the appropriate time I am sure the White House is going to bring this out. They’ve just got some papers out of the National Archives, some people have been writing a book and there are papers being written from the book as a result of the research that these guys have found, and he was opening people’s mail. He was violating what Congress said were statutes that said he couldn’t do it, yet he had judges that said he could. It’s almost an exact replay of what was going on. They loved Roosevelt, but they can’t point to him as an example of how they’re going to lead country in war. So who are they going to point to? They can say whatever they want, but who are they going to point to? JFK, Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter? Who are they going to point to, folks? Zilch, zero, nobody. Play the rest of this, Alltmont.FEINGOLD: This is our most solemn responsibility.RUSH: Yep, yep.FEINGOLD: Democrats should be especially clear that we understand the post-9/11 world. To return to the outset —RUSH: Stop the tape. The very fact that he has to say that Democrats should be especially clear that we understand the post-9/11 world is an admission that they know the Democrats’ position in a post-9/11 world is not only not unclear, it’s known exactly for what it is, and it’s one that doesn’t take the post-9/11 world seriously and thus they can’t be trusted.

FEINGOLD: I think we should show we mean it. We should show that it’s just as important and personal for us as it is for those who sometimes try to use this issue to intimidate us.

RUSH: How you gonna do it? You’ve got your ex-president going over to the Middle East ripping our policy in Iraq, ripping the policy in the war on terror. Who you going to point to? How are you going to show everybody that it’s just as important and personal for you when you have people saying, ‘Can’t go see United 93, it’s too soon. It’s too soon. We can’t, it’s too traumatic.’ How in the world are you going to possibly convince people to take it seriously when you don’t have anybody in your party that does. All right, this is it. He answers a question. Gets a question, Q&amp;A, and this is right out of Shelby Steele. The question is this, and this is the club president, Jonathan Salant. He says, ‘Can you outline the principles on which foreign policy and national security should be based?’ Listen carefully to this, folks.

FEINGOLD: The first and foremost thing is the safety and national security of the American people. The number one responsibility is to protect Americans. Now, the question of how you do that is what I discussed in my speech. It’s being smart.

RUSH: Stop the tape. So he’s telling this news guy, ‘You idiot, you ask me this? I just explained it in my speech.’ The truth is nobody heard him say it in the speech which is why they got the question. But he thinks he said it. Resume tape there, Alltmont.

FEINGOLD: –understanding this connection between a violation of human rights and a countries — the people of a country feeling that the somehow the United States helped repress them. All I have to do is mention the Shah of Iran and the whirlwind that we reaped because of our inappropriate support for the Shah. So I think that is the foundation.

RUSH: This is gibberish. This is gobbly-gook. This is wandering in vain for a cogent thought. You understand what he just said, folks? The question, ‘Could you outline the principles on which foreign policy and national security should be based?’ He answered right out of John Kerry’s handbook, going to be smart, yeah, going to do it smarter and better. And then he says, ‘it’s understanding this connection between the violation of human rights and a countries, the people of the country feeling that somehow the US helped repress them.’ It’s our fault, folks. This is right out of Shelby Steele. This is the guilt that people like Feingold and other liberals feel.

It’s our fault we’re too powerful, we’re too big, we had slavery, we violate people’s human rights. It’s understandable that there would be terrorists, and we need to incorporate this into our foreign policy so that the next time we get attacked by a terrorist group, we must understand why and perhaps even acknowledge that we deserve this, especially if we can blame it on a former Republican president. Folks, do you hear what this guy is saying? He’s asking to be taken seriously on protecting the country in a post-9/11 world and proceeds to blame this country for the fact that people around the world hate us and that gives them the justification to attack us. Speaking of Shelby Steele. He was on John Gibson’s show on the Fox network yesterday afternoon, and you gotta get his book. We’re going to interview him for The Limbaugh Letter the week after next, for our next issue. I want to give you just a little tidbit here, because Gibson says, ‘Explain this to me, Mr. Steele. How does white guilt have something to do with a situation like Iraq?’

STEELE: America as a great western power, the greatest western power in the world, is stigmatized by the past of the west — colonialism from Europe, racism, slavery, segregation in America, and imperialism, so that when we exercise our power in the world, particularly our military power, we invoke that stigma, and we come off in the eyes of people who want to hold us accountable in this way as imperialists who want to occupy and oppress a small brown skinned country. And so to avoid that stigma and to make people see that we’re not occupiers and we’re not imperialists and we’re no longer like what the west used to be, we practice war with a kind of minimalism that almost leaves a little room for the enemy to continue to fight us. We don’t use all of our power because in using all of our power we would seem to be the old white supremacists of the past.

RUSH: Exactly right. But it gets manifested in far more obscene and dangerous ways in the little gray cells inside the skull of little munchkins like Russ Feingold. The guilt manifests itself in such a way that we are still committing these atrocities of imperialism and racism and bigotry and homophobia, etc, etc., etc., and so when we get hit, part of our foreign policy is learning how to blame ourselves. That’s your modern day liberal wing of the Democratic Party. Here’s one more. Gibson’s next question, ‘A lot of people would think people of color would think white guilt’s a good thing.’

STEELE: It sounds like it would be a good thing, but it’s not. It’s the reverse of that. It’s not a guilt of conscience where people struggle with a moral dilemma. It’s simply running from the stigmatization as racists. Whites after the sixties, after the — as I talk about in the book — the collapsing of white supremacy, became stigmatized as racists and had to then begin dissociate from that and most of our racial policy in America has been more about helping whites sort of fight that stigma than doing anything to help achieve equality.

RUSH: Exactly right because the left doesn’t really want equality. They need victims. They need oppressed minorities so they can continue to blame white bigots, they can maintain this overall feeling of guilt. You know, I think this whole notion of guilt, I think it explains public polling on the economy. You go out and you talk to anybody individually, and the odds are, life’s never been better, they’re more confident holding their jobs, it’s going to improve. The statistics, the reality indicate this. And yet, those same people will be reluctant to say that because they think their neighbor, or even people in a different town they don’t even know, are not doing well because they’ve been buying into the Drive-By Media hit pieces on this. So a guilt overcomes them. They don’t want to tell people how good they’re doing or how good they think the economy is because they feel so bad that it may not be good for other people. Ergo, you end up with a poll that is totally unrepresentative of the truth. I mean, Shelby Steele has hit something here that is so — I mean, one of the most brilliant things to me is simplicity. It’s not saying something totally complex that nobody can understand. Brilliance is being able to synthesize what people think is a problem they can’t get their arms around and making it so easily understandable that millions grasp it, and that’s what he’s done in this book. This whole concept that we have guilt over our achievement, guilt over our power, guilt over our past, guilt over our prosperity, our size and all, explains so much, including opinion polls about such things as the economy. One more bite here. Question from Gibson. “So, can you do almost anything in this country if you make white people afraid of being stigmatized as racists?” STEELE: You have enormous power, absolutely. Whites simply do not feel they have the moral authority to ask for difficult things. For example, not a single president of the United States since the civil rights victories has asked black America to do anything on its own behalf in terms of achieving equality. All the requests are on white America, what whites must do, what institutions must do, so forth, what programs have to be instituted. There’s never a president who has enough moral authority to look at his black citizens and say, “What happened to you in the past is terrible, but in order to move into the future, here’s some things you’re going to have to do.”RUSH: I don’t think they don’t have the moral authority. They don’t have the moral courage. They don’t have the guts. This is not a criticism, it’s fact. There are a lot of people that do have the courage, and look what happens to them when they say it? I mean, I can remember back in the heat of the homeless debate, I would say something as simple as, “You know, train these people to get a job.” And liberals would say, “Easy for you to say,” as though I should feel guilty in advocating self-reliance or responsibility. I’m sure it’s happened to some of you when you’ve been in conversations with people. So Shelby Steele here, right on the money. There’s never a president who has enough moral authority to look at his black citizens and say, hey, what happened to you in the past is terrible but in order to move into the future you’ve got to do some things yourself. No, what we get is Bill Clinton proclaiming himself to be the first black president, apologizing all over the world for what we have supposedly done to people all over the world. He is the epitome of what Shelby Steele is talking about, by the way.

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